


Troll-Taken

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: At Sunrise the Monster Turns to Stone Mid-Rape - Person Being Raped is Trapped until Sunset, Bergtagning, Body Horror, Captivity, Choking, Digital penetration of victim, Gang Rape, Group fuck toy, Horror, Kidnapping, Masturbation, Other, Rape, Raped by Monsters, Spitroasting, Trolls, Unwilling Arousal, Wilderness Survival, Xeno, petrification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 20:37:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15781668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Bergtagen: literally "mountain-taken"; Troll-taken, spirited away, in Scandinavian folklore.A lone botanist camping in the mountains is taken by Trolls.





	Troll-Taken

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a discussion of petrification kink that made mention of the tag "At Sunrise the Monster Turns to Stone Mid-Rape - Person Being Raped is Trapped until Sunset".

i.

 

He'd heard stories of unfortunate travellers perishing, heard songs of adventurers spitroasted by Trolls over their campfires and devoured, recounted at the inns of every hamlet dotting the foothills of the Oreadean Volcanic Range, to scare off would-be explorers undaunted by simple geological peril. He'd laughed the stories off, downed his beer and talked about the soil conditions that gave the region its famous barley crops, then ordered another round of beers. The older members of his party hadn't laughed so hard, but they'd brought him along as their botanist, and were glad he'd finally overcome his homesickness enough to comment on his speciality.

Three weeks later and a mile or more higher above sea level, he'd learn to his cost what could be discovered in the mountains.

He'd made camp next to a stream at dusk, planning on braving the narrow pass beneath a natural bridge and look for the source of the water the next day. Awakened by the waning warmth of his dying fire, he had stoked it afresh and risen to take a piss, and had gone off to examine some unusual clumps of phosphorescent vegetation and found himself scrambling to get back to camp in the dark, guided by the fire, padding carefully over rough terrain, watching his step attentively all the way to avoid twisting his ankle by putting a foot down wrong. By the time he realised he'd walked down the wrong side of a ridge to an unfamiliar camp the Trolls had noticed him and he couldn't outrun them. The sweep of a long arm kocked him over and the three of them were upon him.

They seized him by the coat and dangled him in the air over their fire and he begged them not to eat him, but they showed no indication of understanding his language, nor did he understand theirs. Each of them examined him in turn, and they seemed to argue between themselves for an eternity before coming to a decision.

They tore his clothes off. Their three faces leered up at him. One of them took a handful of fat from a satchel and rubbed it over his body, between his legs, and he felt the Troll's fingers digging into his rump and thought of the songs and began to cry.

The Troll holding him set him down on a patchwork leather quilt heaped with the scraps of his clothes and patted his head with its enormous hand. He felt himself grabbed from behind by another one of the Trolls. He heard the sound of trollish grunting, and suddenly his legs were yanked apart and he felt himself impaled on a hard blunt rod the width of which almost tore him apart but for the grease easing its way. It slid into him, and in, and in... And stopped. The pain was astonishing but so was his surprise and relief at not being penetrated all the way through and killed.

Then he felt the Troll's hands gripping him about the hips and pulling him away, and the rod slid out again.

And then he was impaled once more.

It was fucking him. One of the Trolls was fucking him, while the others watched and held him down. 

But the Troll in front of him was not content with merely watching very long. It kneeled in front of him and he could see its member hardening in a thatch of grassy hairs, rising wide and knobbly like a stubby tree limb between its massive thighs.

The Troll in front of him parted his mouth open with its dirty clawed fingers and scooted closer. When the Troll behind him thrust again, it pushed him directly into the path of the other Troll's cock, while his jaws were forced wide to welcome its monstrous girth. It tasted like dirt and musk and choked him, filth turning to mud on his tongue.

Release, all too brief, as the Trolls pulled back, let him catch his breath. Then they began to pump in and out of him from both ends, and he found himself spitroasted after all.

They were huge, and strong, and their members were as rough as their hands, but their lumbering movements, once they had him caught between them, were slowed, and unfrenzied. He felt himself loosen, relaxing to accommodate them despite himself, his body overcoming the initial shock, other sensations than pain beginning to overwhelm him.

He drooled around the knob the one Troll pushed down his throat, gagging. Diluted muck oozed out over his stretched lips, and his saliva coated the bark-like skin over the hard core of its member.

On the other end, the fullness of his impalement squeezed the breath out of him. His eyes rolled back: the pain of the greased rod's entry eased, the push and pull turning into something that plucked a strange unwelcome note at the core of him, something like pleasure. Friction began to burn him deliciously, and disgust decomposed with arousal.

The two Trolls toyed with his body. He felt like little more than a sleeve tugged between them, through which they might touch if they chose to thrust any harder. If he let himself go, succumb to their abuse, perhaps it would drive that thought from his mind. 

The third Troll crouched by their side, its hands occupied between its legs. He could only see it out of the corner of his eye. The Troll that fucked his face kept his head angled toward it, in alignment for its member to slide as far as the constriction of his throat would give in to it, indifferent to the scraping of his teeth or whether he breathed through his mouth or nose. He looked up through fluttering eyelids but the Troll's expression was craggy, unreadable.

It thrust and thrust without apparent effort, moving in pulsating waves, the ripples it sent through him meeting those of the Troll fucking him from behind and slowly tuning his whole body to their vibration. He felt banged like a two-ended drum, stretched taut at his extremities, the notes sounding lower, lower...

He barely perceived it as their colour seemed to shift. The Trolls seemed grayer, the ruddy glare of the fire paling on their flanks. The thrusts slowed, but their cocks did not soften. Instead, they seemed to harden even more, no longer hard as wood, but hard as rocks.

The hands around his waist, the fingers holding down his chin and guiding his head turned heavier. With a shiver, he felt the Trolls penetrate him once more and suddenly go still.

The sun had risen, and turned them to stone.

And he was trapped.

Impaled on both ends, stretched out and filled to the brim, and immobilised in their clutches. Held on all fours, helpless to free himself.

And his own cock hard as a rock but still flesh, pressing against the bulge of the troll's cock distending his belly from within.

 

ii.

 

In the brightening daylight his view was filled by the body of the Troll. He looked down his nose, breathing with difficulty, at the length of cock that had not completely fit into his mouth, and beyond, at the crotch where it emerged from its body, an offshoot of its petrified trunk, surrounded at its base by parasitical pilosity. He tried to relax his jaw around the member lodged down his throat, tried to swallow the drool that threatened to choke him. The Troll's hands, frozen in place, held his face tilted in position, making it impossible for him to pull back. He would break his teeth on its stony cock if he tried to close his jaw. Rotating his head ever so slightly against the Troll's palm, he gained just enough room to exhale around the gag's gritty, unyielding mass; a momentary, faint respite from the imminence of his own death.

His head was caged, but so were his hips. The other Troll's hands lifted them, its fingers wrapped around his waist, its thumbs pressed into the small of his back. His knees might have touched the ground if he could have brought them together, but he was splayed open by the Troll's enormous cock, invading him more deeply than the one in his mouth could: he felt it deep in his belly, just as unforgivingly solid and unmoving. He could feel his own weight resting on it. His hipbones in the Troll's hands, his tailbone on its cock. His body still throbbed from the pounding he'd received.

Only his hands were free, but he needed to prop himself up to keep his weight off his neck. His fists clenched in the tatters of his clothes beneath him; beneath that, the strange, smooth leathery patchwork cover lay, pinned down by the Troll's knees.

Oh, how his body throbbed. He raised a hand and grabbed at the Troll's fingers around his face, hoping to break them off, but the stone would not crack, would not budge, and the effort ran up into his shoulders, strained his neck.

Unable to look down at himself, he ran one hand down his torso instead, exploratively. His skin had been chafed where they had torn off his clothes, but he was still covered in grease. He smelled it: thick, globby, rendered animal fat, serving both as lotion and lubrication. And down below, his involuntary erection, from which liquid had also begun to seep. He could only just grab it between the stony fingers of the Troll.

He shivered at his own touch. The pleasure felt so good, and he needed relief so desperately. Perhaps if he came it would clear his mind and he would devise a way out of this trap. He tugged at his own, supple, slick skin, slippery with grease, and caressed himself gently, soothingly, reassured by the warmth and relative flexibility of his own member, the feel of his own fingers.

The fullness of the Troll's cock pushed pleasure centers inside him too, and he began to writhe slowly around it as he stroked himself. He tried to make it last. The pleasure brought him elsewhere. A warm, red place, the glow of dawn through his closed eyelids, anywhere but here. He grabbed the stone hand around his head, brought himself off the ground with one arm while the other one stroked, held in place by his own bonds. His legs tensed, and his toes curled. He still had a sock on one foot.

He struggled harder to breathe as his own chest muscles tensed, letting out juddering groans, his mouth drying up around the stone gag. He stroked himself faster, harder, not longer seeking comfort but release. 

He came and regretted it immediately as his body jerked in a powerful reflex, bruising himself on the stone phallus, his weight on it doubling down on the pleasure and sending him jerking harder, more painfully, uncontrollably, shrieking into the rock in his mouth. Only the Troll's hands on his hips contained him, stopped him from tearing himself apart by limiting his range of motion, and limply he twitched against the monstrous grip, bringing both hands up to grasp the fingers around his face to support his head and save his neck.

A merciless release this was. He was still trapped, and possibly more injured now. But the pain and pleasure flooded his body with a new warmth, an afterglow in the gloaming.

He rested then, inasmuch as he could, while the numbing effects lasted. The sun kept rising. 

The Trolls' fire had gone down, its smoke blowing hazily from the shallow pit. His own untended fire would be going out in his own camp over the ridge, not that far from where he was. It got cold at night at this altitude, but the sunlight would keep him warm despite his nakedness. 

As his eyes refocused on the inescapable sight in front of them he noticed a small bud in the hairs on the Troll's crotch that seemed primed to bloom. He watched it with scientific curiosity, but the motion was slow, and his discomfort blossomed faster than the eerie bud. Whether it would be a flower, or a fruiting body, he wasn't sure. No one had heretofore seen this strange vegetation and lived to report it.

He searched the jumbled remains of his clothes. He had had a knife on him, but if it had fallen out nearby it was out of his reach. The top of his feet rested on the leathery patchwork blanket. He wondered what it was made of. His hands felt rough heavy stitches, different textures of animal hides scraped of their fur. A Troll's blanket. Then he felt a small bumpy shape under his fingers and his blood froze in his veins.

A human ear. There wasn't anything else it could be.

Fear settled in the bottom of his stomach again, somewhere near the head of the Troll's cock. His jaw trembled against the other's. He gripped the Troll's hands around his head and whimpered, trying not to cry.

He wondered which prospect was worse: whether he would die here of thirst, trapped forever between stone Trolls until his body rotted and fell apart and only his pelvis dangled from the one's cock and his skull stayed pinned in the other's hands, or whether dusk would bring them back to life, to seal his fate another way.

The hours stretched on.

He watched the bud bloom, miserably, into a tiny purulent flower.

 

iii.

 

The sun beat down on his back, between the shadows of the two Trolls. 

He found a metal buckle from the scraps of his jacket and began to scrape away at the stone fingers that held his head in place, blindly but steadily. After a while he looked at the piece of metal and saw that it has been worn down by the scraping, but he felt no difference in the surface of the Troll's petrified skin.

He continued scraping, sharpening the metal's edge until it was sharp enough to shave the stubble on his chin where he could reach it. He had no knife, but there were always uses for a razor, except against the hard preternatural stone that imprisoned him. 

If he could have cut himself free by sacrificing a limb he would have done it then, but the way out with that particular key was his life itself.

He waited.

The stone in his mouth and the trickle of drool he was powerless to contain and the gradual increase in heat as noon approached awakened his thirst. He reckoned the time by the shadows of the Trolls, and by his body's mounting needs, his aches, his hunger, and the noises he could discern from the nature around him. There was the faint babbling of the mountain stream in the distance, the calls of birds, wind carrying smells up from the faraway lowlands.

A pollinating insect alighted on the polyp-like flower and became englued in its sticky nectar. 

He laughed abjectly.

Then he tried to scream, but only produced a muffled sound he doubted would even be heard as far as his deserted camp. His jaw hurt. His back burned under the sun, and the grease covering his body soured with the mixed stench of his sweat.

He tensed his back, tried to leverage himself to attack the fingers around his waist with both hands, to no avail. He beat his fists against the fingers around his head, punched and battered them as hard as he could, putting as much weight as his neck would bear into it, to no avail.

He was pinned in place, mounted on both ends, flailing as uselessly as a moth against a lamp.

The insect in the flower stopped struggling. 

He picked up the buckle and cut down the flower. He kept cutting until he'd shaved the Troll's grassy hairs to the roots and ruined, then snapped the thinned edge of the buckle, breaking it in half.

The smell of cut grass filled his nostrils. He sneezed and smashed his upper teeth against the cock between his jaws. It hurt. Something in his mouth chipped off.

He beat his hands about his trapped head again. He rubbed the mulched, bloodied mess in his hands around his own cock and stroked himself again, feeling deranged.

A little bit more pleasure, but he wouldn't take it as far as before, unless, until the urge to tear himself apart grew overwhelming.

He fucked himself on the Troll's cock, taking care to keep himself in check. There wasn't enough grease anymore.

He had the idea to throw the tatters of his clothes up onto his back but by then he was already sunburned.

That would ruin the quilt the Trolls might make of him, if it came to that.

He lolled dejectedly in their grip, choked as much by misery as by stone.

The sun started to go down.

He sucked on the Troll's cock, trying to swallow his own saliva to abate his thirst. He thought he might swallow whatever came out of the Troll's cocks if they came back to life at sunset.

Would they?

The shadows of the Trolls lengthened. 

What did Trolls have for breakfast? he wondered.

All the different kinds of animals he could feel stitched together underneath him, he thought likely.

But what if they did not reanimate?

Would he die of exposure overnight, or live to die of thirst another day? He pawed the ground for the broken buckle, tested its jagged points against the tip of his thumb. 

The sun had ceased to bake his skin, and shone low close to the horizon. It grew darker in the shadows of the Trolls. The day had gone by and half driven him mad but he himself had gone nowhere at all. He had hurt himself, struggling against impassive stone, but if the stone became Troll-flesh again, alive again to act out their whims upon him, how much more vulnerable he would be then.

He felt his dread mounting in anticipation, and his body trembled around the two Trolls' cocks.

 

iv.

 

Temperatures dropped as the sunlight went out. He felt the cold, compounded by the poor circulation in his limbs due to his immobility. He tried to shake his legs for warmth, but this made his body grind against the cock that impaled him from behind. He felt a soreness deep in his gut, and stabs of hunger in his stomach, and thirst, and cramping in his spine vying for the forefront of his preoccupations, but his head ached on its own, between his distended jaw muscles and the pounding sensation at the back of his skull.

Blood congealed on his hands from the blows he'd struck against the Troll. Blood pounded in his ears, somehow louder in the dark, though the mountainside had shown little animation during the day. 

He felt it as a pulsation first, out of step with his own heartbeart. Slower, deeper, but accelerating at the speed of dark. The Trolls were reanimating, subject to a kind of nocturnal anthesis.

He had started to worry that if they resumed fucking him after he had spent the whole day drying out in the sun their exertions would evert him like a tight glove once the fingers pulled out and inflict catastrophic damage to his body, and he was raked by hollow laughter at the thought.

The Troll cock softened on his parched tongue, and he felt fluid trickling down the back of his throat in time with the pulsations. He swallowed. He was past caring.

The Troll hands around his head loosened, and the detumescing member in his mouth began to withdraw, but he grabbed it by the base and squeezed before it slipped out entirely. Sucking onto the tip of the Troll's cock, he milked its length in both hands to slake his thirst. The liquid came slowly, thin and sour-tasting, and cold, but the Troll pulled away and he fell face-first into the pile of his clothes, unable to close his jaw in time to avoid spilling a mouthful of it. 

The second Troll did not pull out. Unbalanced, it tipped over, over him, falling to the ground with its crushing weight on his back, but stopping short of killing him. It compressed the breath out of his lungs before he could scream.

Then it raised itself up just enough to lever itself on its arms and began fucking him anew.

And he screamed.

It might have been lubricated by a fluid released upon reanimation too because it did not pull out his insides when it reared back out of him, or that could have been because he might be bleeding internally. It would have made no difference to it regardless.

He screamed.

The Troll fucked on.

But instead of slowing down as it had in the early hours of the morning it sped up. He was unaware of anything else as the Troll's cock fucked him raw and he was half-smothered by the weight of the enormous body behind it.

The rending pain and the accumulated stresses inflicted on his body overtook him, the screams dying in his hoarse throat as he passed into unconsciousness.

 

v.

 

The fire was burning again. A coughing fit shook him awake. Wool smoked in the campfire, stinking of charred hair. One of the Trolls tended the fire, feeding it scraps of fabric. His clothes.

He hadn't slept long. The waning moon hadn't risen yet and he hurt. A lumen had been furrowed inside him by the Trolls' rape and filled with pain. And he thirsted still.

He was lying on his stomach where they had left him, naked and ravaged. Back cramps seized him when he attempted to rise to face away from the smoke, so that he had to gather his legs underneath him and curl up into a ball before he could roll over onto his side, knees up against his chest, cradling his head in his arms. He stayed like that, too sore to move except to work his tongue to try to bring saliva back into his dry mouth, and tip at his chipped tooth. Listening.

He stopped breathing as the Troll lurched over to where he lay, grabbed the last handful of clothes from the ground beside him, and returned to tending the fire. 

One Troll. He had not seen or heard the other two since he'd awoken.

He peered between his arms at the terrain around him. Rocky slopes, dotted by grasses, wildflowers, mosses. The curious plant life of this blasted region he'd been hired to study. The silhouettes of conifers darker against the night sky downhill. The low ridge beyond which lay his camp and, uphill, the gorge and its natural bridge between the rising cliffs. How far could he run, in the dark, with all of one sock on his feet? If he could run.

The heat of the fire radiated on his sunburnt back.

He felt around with one arm, and gingerly uncurled to crouch on his hands and knees, biting his lip to keep himself from whimpering. Crawling on all fours, he tried to find his knife again, or anything he might use as a weapon, but he could not even find the broken metal buckle with its sharp points from the strap of his coat anymore. They had burned his boots, his clothes, and he had left everything except the clothes on his back back at his camp. The Trolls had some gear of their own in a pile, some metal pots next to the fire. His fingertips touched the ear in the leathery quilt again. By the firelight, he could also make out the outline of an eye, where part of a human face was stitched to another species's hide, and he dry-heaved.

The Troll had sat down on its haunches next to the fire, with its back to him.

Uphill, downhill, or over the ridge to try to get back to his camp? He removed his one sock, which would only impede his footing or risk catching on a twig and trip him up in the dark, and tied it around one of his damaged hands.

His movements were muted by the abominable blanket as he started to crawl away. Downhill, downhill he might find a trail again, shelter underneath the trees, drink from the stream, rocks or branches to defend himself.

At the edge of the blanket he stepped onto the pebbly ground and tried to stand up without attracting the Troll's attention. He wabbled before he found his balance, his head spinning. The shadows from the flickering fire made the ground dance before him. He put one foot in front of the other, feeling for his footing, swaying on his feet, but stayed standing.

From his upright vantage point he looked around. Just the one Troll in view. Just the sound of the fire crackling. A long walk down to the tree line. And something seeping obscenely from the distended orifice between his legs.

 

vi.

 

Small sharp rocks cut into his soles where he put down his feet. He kept looking over his shoulder for the Trolls to pursue him, his heart wild with the fear that at any moment he might be recaptured.

The quarter moon rose and dimly lit his way.

He could bear the cold while he kept moving. Downhill, careful, onto grass now. Zig-zagging between neck-breaking drops in the slope. Sitting, excruciatingly, to control his slide down steeper inclines.

At the treeline the descent became trickier. He felt his way through the shadows, pricking his hands on the sharp older needles of conifer branches. Where the trees gave him the most cover the night's darkness blinded him most. Unable to move as quickly, he began to shiver. He needed shelter, and rest, until the safety of daylight. He was so thirsty, but exposure would kill him faster than thirst.

Dead leaves could provide insulation, but the deciduous trees were far below, too distant to reach in his condition. He broke off the ends of branches where the needles were still soft, and piled them around a sapling resting in a hollow in the slope, making enough noise that at any moment he expected to hear the Trolls bearing down on him, and heaped dirt and fallen needles on top with stiffening fingers. Then he crawled naked into his shelter, needles sticking to the grease on his skin, curled up like the wounded animal he was, buried his toes in the dirt and crossed his arms over his chest to tuck his hands under his armpits.

He stayed awake, shivering, until his body heat warmed up the pocket of air around him, his senses alert, thin-skinned with exhaustion and hurting from head to toe as the feeling returned to his extremities. 

Only when he heard the first bird calls of the pre-dawn hours did he doze off to restless dreams of pursuit.

He woke with a start, tasting dirt, and retched on an empty stomach at the memory of the Troll's cock in his mouth.

It was midday.

He must find water.

The trek to the stream ate into the precious daylight hours of the afternoon. He had to climb up above the tree line again, to a point where the ridge became passable, before finding it. 

He drank, thirstier than he had ever been in his life. The freezing stream numbed and cleaned his wounded hands. He gargled and spat and washed out his mouth. He dipped his face in the shallow stream, then washed his feet, and rubbed the circulation back into them.

He used the sock as a washcloth to bathe himself, and his genitals shrivelled at the cold. He cleaned up the filth and grease off the rest of his body as best he could, and he discovered the ugly bruises around his hips and waist.

He felt defiled.

He sat in the sun to dry off, hugging himself against the wind, willing his mind to erase the memory of the previous day.

Not thirsty anymore, but light-headed with hunger.

He tore some grass off the ground. It would be poor nutrition, but safe, and might fill his stomach until he could forage for better.

The plant-green taste of the grass's juices when he chewed it sent him retching, no longer on an empty stomach. It made him heave out all the water he'd swallowed, and he needed to wait for his stomach to settle before he could drink again.

He could not rinse off the taste of Troll with vegetation from Troll-country.

The sunlight gave him a few hours more of protection, but clouds were beginning to form around the peaks of the mountains above him.

 

His survey party were several days' walk downhill, digging for ore samples. A dozen people, who would protect him if he returned to them, but who had sent him out here in the first place. Noisy, troublesome prospectors. He'd been glad to venture off on his own, glad of the quiet, the chance to write and collect his thoughts above the dust and din of their drills. He was meant to be gathering plant specimens. Looking for treasures in the natural world. His field press was half-full of drying samples, up at his camp, where he had also left his notebook, tools, medical supplies, spare clothes, bedroll, a tarp to use as a tent...

Food.

He weighed his chances.

Naked in the wilderness, with neither a map nor a knife, flint nor steel, his survival instinct screaming at him to flee while he still could, his survival skills telling him he would be a suicidal fool to spend another night starving and unequipped and easy prey not only to the Trolls but to every other wild animal or monster the darkness might awaken. Alone, against the elements, or alone, against the three.

He looked down at the forested mountain slopes, dappled by late afternoon sunshine through the gathering clouds. He smelled the humidity on the air. 

Butterflies drank from flowers in the meadow while he sat. The stream ran down from the mountains, pure and fresh.

He should run, too.

He found a rock, slightly larger than his fist, and pulled the sock around it until the rock hung down in the toe and he had a makeshift sling in his hand.

 

 

Uphill.

 

vii.

 

He crested the ridge to scope out the territory. His camp lay on one side, the Trolls' on the other. Both fires had probably gone out. He neither saw nor smelled smoke, but the wind was treacherous, pulling moisture from the lowlands to form the clouds above. Downhill was upwind.

He saw on the ground the patches of plants that had led him away from his camp two nights before. Pale leaves and paler flowers, looking more like fungi than flora. Lithophytes, growing on rock.

No time to waste on curiosity. He had to hurry while the sunlight lasted.

 

He saw the Troll from a distance as he approached his camp. Then he saw what was left of his camp.

The Troll was frozen in stone form, halted in its destruction when the sunrise had caught it. The camp was demolished.

His eviscerated bags had been tossed onto the fire, his belongings scattered, smashed, or burned, but, untended, the flames had since gone out, smothered by his woolen blanket, through which they had only singed a hole. The drying boards of his flower press had spilled open, his samples gone up in smoke or scattered in the wind. The Troll held the walking stick that had doubled as a pole for his field clippers, and it had been frozen in the motion of poking at the embers with it.

He swung the rock in its sling and smashed it on the Troll's outstretched hand, hard. And then he swung it again, and again, until the sock broke apart and the rock bounced off, into the firepit, but his rage still burned.

He looked around for a hardier weapon. Boulders, in the stream's bed. He picked up the heaviest rock he could lift, carried it back, and he heaved it down on the Troll's hand. Grunting with the effort, he lifted a second time, and almost crushed his bare foot when the wet rock slipped from his hands after hitting the Troll, but he heard something crack before the dull thud of the rock onto the ground.

He picked his weapon up a third time, and howled with glee when one of the Troll's fingers snapped off under his next blow.

Shaking, he lifted up the heavy rock a fourth time, brought it down on the Troll's hand again, but could not lift it a fifth time. He let it go. He hadn't the strength left in his arms to continue, and the effort had awakened the pains in his neck and jaw.

He dropped to his knees. The Troll's face was expressionless. He hoped it would register pain when it woke up.

He hoped he would be far away when that happened.

He pulled the blanket out of the firepit and wrapped himself in it. He picked up the walking stick that had fallen from the Troll's hand when he'd smashed it and sifted through the remains of his clothes, of his gear. Linen and hemp had burned faster than wool. His clothes were gone beyond use. His papers and samples were burned or lost. His sturdy field clippers' polished handles had cracked off in the fire; the blades were jammed shut. His oiled tarp was destroyed. His water canteen had been crushed and lay empty and dry. The catalogue of destruction went on. 

He wanted to weep at the waste of it all, but his hunger pressed him.

He had stored his food at a distance from his sleeping place, as a routine camping precaution, in a separate bag, and he found it intact, untouched by the Trolls, marked by the garden trowel he had used to half-bury it.

He dug it up ravenously.

He twisted open a tin of preserved beans and ate them cold, watching the Troll and looking around the ruins of his camp, reassessing his options as the sky darkened. 

It started to rain.

He filled the tin in the stream and used it to drink.

There was still sunlight in the distance. It was dark, but it was not sunset yet. He wanted a head start before the Trolls woke, and he had no idea where the other two might be waiting.

He looked around for firemaking equipment. What did the Trolls use? They had no clothes, no pockets to carry tools. But they must use tools. They cooked, and sewed, that he knew.

He noticed that a patch of hair hanging on the Troll's shoulder had sprouted tiny carnivorous flowers, and that its crotch had been scraped bare.

He should have broken all of its fingers. 

He picked up the broken digit. Did they reanimate if they were amputated? Would it bleed? Here was a sample after all. He wrapped it up in a sooty piece of cloth.

In the dirt next to the broken straps of his field press he found his magnifying glass and he wanted to weep again but with gratitude. He put it in the bag along with his food, and knotted the straps and scraps he could salvage to fashion a belt around the woolen blanket. It rained, but wool conserved heat even wet, although it chafed his sunburned back.

 

He would have provisions for the return trek to the survey camp, tools to dig for shelter by night and start fire by daylight. He'd even have evidence of the unimaginable ordeal he'd endured, should he choose to divulge it.

He picked up his walking stick and decamped.

The rain fell harder, and the way down grew slippery. He had lost the childhood habit of walking barefoot in the mud, but it lifted his spirits to think that the rain washed away his trail.

He blinked away raindrops.

He reached the tree line and made some headway, but it would soon grow too dark to keep going, so he stopped and found a crag under which he could fashion himself a shelter. He would not have risked a fire again so near to the Trolls, even if he'd had the tools to start one despite the rain, but he piled up branches and debris again, and made himself a nest of sorts. 

He felt safer.

In the dark, he sat with the bag of food on his knees, and the mountain at his back, listening to the rain. He heard the wind shaking the trees, whistle at the entrance of his hideout. He ate a handful of dried fruit, chewing away from his chipped tooth.

After he reckoned the sun had long set, he felt for the Troll's broken finger in the inner pocket of his bag, away from the food.

The wall of his shelter was ripped away from him. 

He heard the rain spattering on some great obstacle between the sky and the ground, and felt the air displaced by a wide flat shape before it fell on him, then he was scooped up bodily inside it. It closed around him like a great sack, his legs trapped above his head, his hand still stuck inside the pocket of his own bag, his body doubled over and struggling to breathe.

Something lifted him up and carried him off, and its footfalls were as quiet as the rain through the trees.

 

viii.

 

In a rapid burst of insight he simultaneously recognised the texture of the sack as the same stitched patchwork of skins on which his rape had taken place, the futility of calling out for help, and the escalation of hostilities that could be read into his retaliation against the petrified Troll a few hours earlier.

A hard knot of anguish settled into his chest.

He imagined where he'd be, if he'd chosen the other path, if he'd followed his instinct and run away as soon as he'd been able to. Starving, freezing wet, perhaps at the threshold of dying from exposure again, but not, he thought, in this predicament, not in the Trolls' grasp again. Probably.

He found a measure of calm in the certainty that he had doomed himself. It dispelled the fog of panic, swaddled him in repugnance at himself. Dreadful acceptance of his circumstances. Sheer, uncomplicated misery.

It was bracing, in a fashion. Or perhaps he was thinking more clearly because he'd had something to eat, before his stomach was flipped upside-down and squeezed under his knees.

Tree branches stopped rubbing against the sides of the sack. The Troll climbed steadily, effortlessly uphill. It would have been a comfortable if vertiginous ride if he's been sat astride its shoulders, rather than stuck in a suffocating bag: smoother than any steed he'd travelled on in the past. But his mind refused to entertain the subject of his destination.

The patter of rainfall on leather stopped.

The climb continued, but the muffled sounds he could make out had changed. He didn't hear the wind anymore. It sounded like they had entered an enclosed space, and the way the sack swayed on the Troll's back made him believe they were moving downhill now, rapidly, almost vertically.

Then he was set down on the ground. The sack opened, and he was released.

He smelled vegetation, water, but a clean well-aerated space, in which no rot set in from stagnation. He pushed the leather flap off of himself, scrambled clear of the whole abhorrent surface of it and onto a cold stone floor, clutching his provisions.

A soft phosphorescence outlined the space in an eerie glow. There were pale patches of inflorescent lithophytes growing on the walls. He was in a long chamber, roughly trapezoidal as the walls narrowed near the ceiling, interspersed by dark fissures and oblique low bulkheads of rock bearing more lithophytes.

It felt like being within a sunless greenhouse.

The wonder of it stupefied him.

The Troll moved in the semi-darkness and scraped two pieces of wood together over a tabular surface of rock, producing a brief bright ember that caught on a charred cloth, and it transferred the flame to a bowl full of tallow. He laughed. Of course. It was child's play to them to produce enough friction to light fires.

The lamplight made the cave infinitely more forbidding.

 

ix.

 

He stood and took a step back.

His hand came out of his provision bag holding the severed finger. He tossed it in the direction of the Troll. It came unwrapped as it rolled onto the floor.

He couldn't see, in the semidarkness, whether the finger was still petrified. The Troll picked it up. Its corresponding hand had all of its own fingers. 

It set the finger down and dipped its own hand in the flaming tallow, scooping some of it out, and came toward him holding it aloft like a torch.

He backed away, staggering into a rock formation. The tallow burned in the Troll's hand, doubling the illumination in the cave chamber. The Troll leaned forward and held its hand out near enough to him that he felt the heat from the flame. It had him cornered. Its features in the flicker of light were like a face seen in the bark of a weathered tree out of the corner of one's eye that disappeared if one looked at it head-on, the mouth a puckered hole that might have been a knot in the wood before its center collapsed, rotted away underneath. The Troll's unblinking eyes gazed into his. It used its empty hand to tear off his belt. His wool blanket fell away from his body at its pull. 

He stared into the flame. 

The Troll closed its fist, extinguishing it. Hot drops of tallow dripped from between its fingers, charging the room with the stink of animal fat. He felt more than he saw the few that fell on his skin, and caught his breath sharply, wincing from the burn. The Troll seemed indifferent to its effects. It rubbed its fingers together, coating them in the warm tallow, then put its hand on his belly, and he moaned with dismay. The heat had dissipated enough not to sear his flesh anymore, but the warmth spread in his loins, a mockery of desire. He shuddered. 

The Troll moved its hand lower, and clasped his cock, and slid it in its rough, slippery grasp, coating him in the warm animal fat. It curled a finger around his balls while the curve of its palm more than encircled his cock. It could have crushed him effortlessly, or seared him to agony if it had grasped him while the fat still burned in its palm. His mind seized on that thought. The Troll rubbed its thumb over the head of his cock. 

He arched his back helplessly against the rock. He felt horrified and aroused, and horrified at his own arousal. And terrified for his life if his actions should stand in the way of the Troll's designs on his body. 

The Troll loomed over him, backlit by the tallow dip, and worked his cock to hardness. It coaxed pleasure into his terror, and he faced away from it, shutting his eyes. It squeezed his fragile flesh and toyed with his balls and slid its fingers underneath to tease at his anus. Then, balancing him on two fingers betwen his legs and the rest wrapped around his genitals, it lifted him one-handed off the ground against the stone at his back. 

Panicked at the sudden lurch, he clutched at the rock, opening his eyes reflexively, his fingers digging into the phosphorescent growths for purchase, his buttocks and legs clenching around the Troll's hand for support. It raised him higher, heedless of his resistance, as if he weighed nothing.

The Troll sat him down on a narrow ledge and released its grip around him briefly. 

It picked his belt up off the ground, and returned to him, spreading his thighs wide by pushing his knees apart. He saw the Troll's mouth opening, saw it dive towards him. 

Something inside his mind that had clung to sanity broke. 

The Troll engulfed his cock in its mouth. 

His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and his jaw dropped. The suction overwhelmed him. He breathed hard, his head thrown back, his own mouth wordlessly agape. The Troll's mouth defied his comprehension. It licked at him from all sides and rooted at his flesh with hidden tendrils, repulsively moist and cool. Its lips pumped him into the depths of the most abject arousal. He let go of the rock and held the Troll's head, bucking his hips to meet it.

The Troll's hands dropped away from his legs. 

As the Troll sucked on his engorged cock, its hands busied themselves. He felt the squeeze of something too thin to be the Troll's lips or fingers digging into his skin and cutting off his circulation. The Troll tied the strap of leather from his field press around the base of his erection and then looped another knot around the top of his balls. Then its slimy mouth peeled off of him. It left the end of the strap dangling between his legs and carried him off the lip of rock by the shoulders.

The Troll set him down on the leather cover again and flipped him over onto his stomach, pinning his erection between his belly and the patchwork of flayed skins. Then it tied his hands together behind his back at the wrists, and bound them to the strap between his legs, connected to his genitals. Then it folded his knees back and also tied his ankles to his wrists.

And then the Troll put out the flame in the tallow dip and left him there in the dim phosphorescence, bound, arrested and immobilised in the thick of arousal.

 

x.

 

He lay his cheek down on the blanket of skins, his thigh muscles stretched taut, his erection throbbing.

Had that been the third Troll, from that first night and interminable day? The one that hadn't fucked him then, the one that had let him slip away. He did not know how to tell their strange features apart, familiar only with the parts of their bodies that had defiled him. And perhaps there were others he'd never seen. A mountainful of Trolls.

And he would fuck them all for a quick merciful death.

He pictured it in his mind.

Let them penetrate him, violate him in every imaginable way and unimaginable ones. If it had been remotely possible to bargain with the Trolls he would have bargained for his death, offered himself up in sacrifice; but they already had the disposal of his body. His life was theirs. He would suck them off, he would let them fuck him end to end and rip him apart. He would welcome those monstrous cocks, he would come in those monstrous mouths, be devoured whole by the mountain and in turn rendered into tallow and stitched into the quilt he lay on.

He ground his bound and engorged cock weakly under his own weight.

His body ached for deliverance.

Let death come.

 

 

 

Then a Troll came to him, dropping from a dark channel in the ceiling so quietly it startled him. It paused by the stone counter where the tallow was but did not light it.

It was the one missing a finger. He felt its stump when it grabbed his face and raised him to his knees.

He opened his mouth unbidden, to be fucked as it pleased.

The Troll brought forth its severed finger instead, put it into his mouth, forced it down his gullet, and he discovered a new kind of pain.

The finger caught beneath his breastbone, halted in the path to his stomach, distending his digestive tract against his airway, too large to go any further down. He felt as if he would die from the obstruction, as if his heart were exploding. For all of his resolve to welcome death, he struggled powerfully for breaths that afforded him the barest intake of air, coughing fruitlessly and spitting, unable to swallow his own saliva, tearing up in distress. 

Then the Troll fucked him. 

It slid into his wet drooling mouth, pistoning into his throat, and he could only gag uselessly around the Troll's cock, racked by pain.

The Troll grunted.

It thrust faster and came urgently, shooting its cold load into him, a shock that missed his airway, instead dislodging the obstructive finger with the force of a liquid hammer that washed it down into his stomach, and he drank in a great gasp of air at last as the Troll pulled out, leaving its finger inside him, fertilised by come.

The Troll cast him aside. His body buckled when it let go, but he could not double over past the limits of his bondage, the torture of the knot around his balls. The pain and lack of air had exacerbated his hard-on. 

Only the pain in his chest had reached a climax that had allowed it to subside.

He waited, just breathing, wriggling his fingers and toes to keep the feeling alive in them while the Troll rested.

 

 

 

The other Troll returned after a while.

He heard their bleating, rumbling low voices, unintelligible words interspersed with silences that roiled his insides. Throwing up now might be the last thing he ever did, if it meant expulsing the Troll's finger.

The Troll that had just returned scooped him up off the ground again, one hand supporting his pelvis while the other tilted his shoulders back, proffering his body to the other Troll, his arched hips and inflamed cock foremost. 

Then it lowered them both to the ground. His bound feet came to rest on the Troll's abdomen, the weight in his stomach tumbling over when the Troll reclined him along its torso. Both of the Troll's arms wrapped around him obtrusively. If he strained his neck he could just barely see over them. The other Troll placed its hands on his legs, the stump of its missing finger against the softness of his inner thigh, and its head disappeared as it bent over them. 

He felt a tremor in the body of the Troll supporting him. The grassy hairs on the other Troll's head tickled his balls, moving back and forth. 

Then the Troll's head moved up, and when it wrapped its mouth around his cock he expected it to bite down and cut it off in revenge. To swallow a part of him as it had made him swallow its severed finger. He would have shrunk back in terror and disgust if the straps hadn't kept him hard.

But the Troll's mouth only produced a moist curious flutter along his shaft, and he strained himself toward it, begging for more because it was so good to feel its touch on his inflamed skin.

The Troll ignored his protest.

It released him and moved down again, to suck the cock of its peer, he realised.

He struggled impatiently.

At length the Troll came back to him, and began to suck. The moist toothless friction of it sent him wild. The Troll pumped, sucking harder, licking and prodding the head of his cock within the depths of its mouth. His whole body tensed, primed to climax, and his balls convulsed against the confines of the knotted strap.

He came, thrashing in the Troll's arms, spilling into the Troll's mouth.

The Troll stopped. Its curious tendrils danced around him, then it withdrew, its lips sliding off his still-hard shaft and closing shut as it popped out. It let go of his legs.

Its moved as a dark mass in the dim light. The bulk of its body hung over him as it came face to face with the other, so close to his head. Its lips parted, dribbling into the other Troll's mouth. Sharing the taste of him.

The vibrations of their bodies echoed in his ribcage.

The Troll below him rumbled.

The Troll above grunted back, and lowered itself again, its torso sliding across the oversensitised tip of his imprisoned cock.

It paused, mouthing at him again.

The Troll tugged on a length of the strap, and the knots binding him came loose. His cock softened in the Troll's mouth, the blood flowing back into his body, circulating freely in his legs and hands again. Still trapped in the other Troll's arms, he unfolded his legs, the looseness from his orgasm mitigating the cramps seizing his muscles.

And then he felt the rising hardness of the Troll's cock under his legs.

 

xi.

 

He would have liked to linger in the respite of their unexpected gentleness. He had lost track of how long it had been since he'd been brought to this place. The pleasure had dulled his pain but not erased the tightness in his chest, his soreness of throat and jaw, or decreased his overall exhaustion. His hands and feet tingled. He could move his legs freely, but only a few possibilites were open to him, and running away was not among them.

Resignedly, he stroked the length of the cock underneath him with his feet. He wanted the night to end. Under his hands, which were still pinned behind his back by the Troll's hold on him, the Troll's skin was cracked and squamous, almost rigid, neither hot nor cold. Its torso was solid. It breathed slowly, but he could not perceive a heartbeart. The Troll's cock was still rough under the scabbed cuts and bruises on his feet, but the skin had enough give for his touch to affect the Troll.

He cupped the soles of his feet around the base of the Troll's cock. They had no external gonads that he'd seen or felt when they had raped him. There had been no belly button for him to fixate on... was it only yesterday, or the day before that? the cave gave him no indication of the passage of time... when he had been trapped with the Troll's belly as his only horizon. Their bodies had hair on their heads and groins, but those did not turn to stone with the rest of their anatomies. Ectosymbiosis of some kind?

He wondered if the Trolls turned to stone underground. Was the phenomenon directly linked to the the sunlight, or a biological cycle in tune to the rhythm of the days? He didn't want to find out the hard way.

The cover of rainclouds hadn't been enough to revive the Troll at his camp.

That Troll was now losing interest in toying with his unresponsive cock. Its mouth around his flesh still felt far more pleasant that it ought to have, but he was spent. Leaving a wet trail to gooseflesh his skin in the cool air, it returned its attentions to the other Troll. He thought he felt a response, something shifting in the body underneath his. He couldn't see the Troll's face as it pumped around the other's cock between his legs, but the urge came upon him to kick, to try to burst its eyeballs with his heels while they were in range. If he kicked fast enough, hard enough, he might hit something frangible somewhere in the Troll's impervious surface. 

But he quelled the urge, clenching his sore jaws in frustation. The tearing ache in his chest and the weight in his stomach would not let him forget what the Troll's last injury had cost him. Too close a brush with the reality of it had taken the shine off his death wish. He wanted no more pain. If he were agreeable to his captors, they might be kinder to him.

He rubbed the instep of his foot along the Troll's jaw. He heard a repulsive slurp as it released the hard cock from its mouth, then felt his foot enveloped in the Troll's mouth. No, no, no. His mind rebelled again. His foot kept sinking deeper, the tendrils tickling him, the Troll's lips moving past his ankle, around his calf, up to his knee... One jerk of its head and it would disarticulate him there. But oh, the shivers that ran along his inner leg shot straight to his groin, where he felt an answering twinge.

He hadn't thought it possible he'd get another erection this soon, but his cock was responding. He wriggled his toes in the back of the Troll's throat. Perhaps they too had a gag response: it expelled his leg intact before his hard-on could return.

The other Troll might have become impatient then. It sat up, pushing them both away. He glimpsed a second in which he might have run away, if he had trusted his legs to carry his weight then, if he had had somewhere to run to. There was no escape from this chamber. He stretched out on the patchwork blanket, rubbing the ligature marks around his wrists as he pressed his fists each in turn against his breastbone. 

The Trolls moved about the room. He heard their rumbles, and a deep bleating cry.

One Troll was upon the other, throwing it back onto the cover and squeezing a handful of cold stinking grease around its cock, its own member already hard.

So, he noted. It had had practice before it had its way with him.

The Troll spread its legs and sank onto the erection it had just coaxed out of the other, taking it all in in one stroke. It fucked its partner face-to-face, rising up and down on its cock and pumping its own. He smiled grimly. Better that they fuck each other than him.

 

xii.

 

He backed away, out of their reach, just in case.

Without the layer of the leather quilt, the stone floor of the cave chilled him. He found his own wool blanket, wrapped himself up in it, and huddled in a corner, waiting for them to finish. 

The worst of it was being reminded by their sounds, by their movements, by the smell of the tallow, of how it had felt to be subjected to those thrusts. His body recalled the sensations that he most longed to forget. He still hurt from his injuries, but the memory of pain did not rekindle pain in his flesh the way memories of arousal and revulsion brought up unrequited echoes.

And he still had the Troll's taste in his mouth. 

The Trolls climaxed. A jet of liquid sprayed from the one on top, misting in fine droplets that flashed with a momentary glow and hung suspended in the air. They disentangled sluggishly from one another. 

They picked at the growths on the walls, and, after a moment, climbed out of the cave.

He was alone. 

He did not move for a long time, waiting for the aerosol to fall back, waiting to see if the Trolls would realise that they had forgotten him and return.

His stomach contracted around a weight that felt like stone.

They had left behind the patchwork leather quilt. He would rest better if he were warmer, so, dispiritedly but pragmatically, he folded it over for more insulation against the stone floor, but kept the woolen blanket betwen the skins and himself. 

Then he laid down with his arm over his face and waited for the pain to ebb enough to let him sleep. 

The cave was the same when he woke up. Silent, cool, glowing faintly so that he could make out the outlines of it near the phosphorescent growths on the rock, the shapes of the Trolls' discarded objects on the floor nearby. The air smelled cleaner.

He had his provisions with him and in some places moisture trickled from the walls. He collected water in his empty tin from his pack and he washed out his mouth. He wouldn't starve yet, or die of thirst.

He did not feel hungry, but he felt sore, weakened and chilled, and food would warm him at least, so he made a breakfast of tinned condensed milk and crackers. A dry crumb caught on the way to his stomach when he swallowed it. Panic seized him as pain flared in gullet again. He beat his fist against his chest, then held himself very still, swallowing saliva, terrified of retching.

It passed. He soaked the next bites and chewed them until they felt safe enough to swallow.

He lay back down and curled up in his blanket for a while. His stomach felt too full, too heavy for the size of the portions he'd ingested. Perhaps it hadn't been safe to eat, if it ran the risk of moving the Troll's finger to a narrower part of his digestive tract, but there was nothing he could do about its intrusion in his body.

He wept.

The very beauty and stillness of the cave oppressed him. The trickle of water, the faint breath of air, the light that lead nowhere. There were fissures in the cave where he could relieve himself, and fissures that let in fresh air from outside, but no external source of light. No source of heat. He couldn't see how to access the passage the Trolls used as an entrance.

He tried the Trolls' fire plough. He had to lay it between his legs to get good traction on their oversized tools. Achieving the first spark took him what felt like hours, but it died before he could light the tallow dip. He rested, and tried again.

The repetitive effort made it easier not to think, worked warmth into his muscles while he rubbed the pieces of wood together to create enough heat.

He made fire.

By the lamplight he saw that the entrance to the cave was high in the overhanging wall and beyond his reach. Impossible for him to climb.

He walked to both ends of the chamber, to the points where the cave narrowed and he would have had to crawl through to continue, which he decided not to attempt.

The cave's surfaces and atmosphere were cool enough to sap his body heat away, unless he tucked himself completely within the covers. Sitting by the tallow dip warmed him up a little, though he found the smell nearly as hateful as the Trolls' blanket, but the grease burned quickly, and he would have to make it last.

He put out the flame, and slept again.

By the next day, or night, he relit the lamp and examined the lithophytes under his magnifying glass. Floral or fungal forms, growing in patterns that made him dizzy as he strained to study them. He would have needed his dissection kit, and better lenses, more tools than he'd carried in his destroyed field equipment. Their glowing inflorescences left a sticky residue when he crushed them between his fingers. He scraped some samples into an empty tin and folded the half-opened lid back over them.

Then he brought his attention to bear on the Trolls' leather quilt.

The hides were incomplete. Partial remains, showing signs of animal predation. There were teeth and scavenger claw marks in the skins, and some looked very old and brittle. The stitches had been repaired with different materials all over the patchwork, some hides poorly preserved by inexpert tanning showing signs of rot.

It was almost unbearable to examine the remains of the skin around the human ear, to see a human scalp cut open and laid flat and stitched between those animal hides, narrowly connected to a section of torso and upper arm. To wonder if he would see the same thing the eye missing from those empty semi-circles of eyelashes had seen, in its final moments; if this victim had been an initiate in the the same secret horrors he'd endured. There was a short stubble on a partial chin, a ragged edge where the neck ended, sewn over the next flap of animal hide.

And bite marks, where the throat had been torn open by a predator with wide-set canines.

He dropped his magnifying glass and clapped his hand over his mouth, remembering the feel of the Trolls' sucking, tendril-lined orifices squeezing moistly around him. 

His stomach contracted around a weight that, just for a moment, felt lifted from him.

 

xiii.

 

He looked over the rest of the quilt for other identifiable remains. The skins of different beasts looked so much alike to him, once scraped of fur, tanned and worn with long use. Nothing else stood out to him as human, but animal skins little resembled animals themselves, and in death human bodies were animal too. The textures varied, some as supple as kid gloves, some near as translucent as the vellum of the oldest botany books he'd once read. He thought of razor strops and saddles, and the dried, salted meat in his provision bag.

He stared at the face in the quilt. 

If the Trolls hadn't killed him, they still had taken what had been left of his body and used it to their own ends. He had died, somewhere in these mountains, and the Trolls had disposed of him.

What help had that man received? What help could come to either of them in this prison?

He bent and whetted the lid of a tin to a sharp point against the rocky floor, and began to unstitch the man's remains from the Trolls' quilt, sawing through knotted catgut in the fading lamplight. 

He might never see the light of day again, and he might not be able to escape that man's fate, might fill the hole left in the blanket in his stead when his end came, but he could do one last thing for him. 

There wasn't much tallow left when he finished unstitching the human skin from the patchwork. He removed it gently and folded it, and set it down far away from the blanket, near the edge of the cave. 

He poured what was left of the melted grease on the flayed skin of the nameless victim, and watched it crisp in the flames. His smoke rose up the chimney of a narrow fissure, it alone escaping to parts unknown. 

When the fire went out, he pushed what was left of the charred remains down a deep crevasse where he hoped the Trolls' long arms would never reach them.

 

xiv.

 

He counted what was left of his food. One more tin of condensed milk, two of beans. He'd never been so glad of self-opening tins. But no more soft foods than that; they'd weighed too much to carry. He hadn't reckoned on difficulties swallowing, or on losing all of his cooking utensils. Crackers, hard cheese, sugar, rolled oats; tea and salt in small resealable tins. Dried fruit, and salted meat. Enough for a lively, dawdling return journey downhill, supplemented with what he might have foraged while collecting more specimens as his load lightened. He might stretch it out for a month or more now, underhill. If he could have reliably numbered the days, going by nothing but the growth of beard on his face to estimate the passage of time.

He had little appetite, huddling in the dark. At times the weight in his stomach seemed not so heavy as before, and hunger pangs shot through him. He ate to keep warm, to give his body the energy to heal. 

He wondered if he could digest stone, if that stone periodically returned to flesh. If that meant the Troll were becoming part of him, as nutrients became part of the organisms that fed on them. If he'd become a part of them because they had sucked on him and swallowed his come, and suckled him with theirs.

Again he contemplated the possibilities of the wait for a slow, miserable starving death, imprisoned in rock, of the sharp edges of metal he might use to abbreviate his own end, or of all the torments the Trolls might revisit upon him if they returned.

Two dead ends and an uncertain one. 

What would he need, if the Trolls returned? What could he use?

His provisions, or what would be left of them. The magnifying glass. His wool blanket for warmth. 

Assuming that they took him out of this oubliette before he became too weak to fight for his life, to outrun them, even to face the wilderness again and chance it with nothing but the skin on his back. 

Which was peeling now, from the sunburn of that first day: part of his skin joining that abominable quilt on the cave floor, so soon.

If only he had shoes. 

There was one loath source of leather, though he was no cobbler, that he could put to use.

In the phosphorescent cave, moving as much by feel as by sight, he patted the ground for the straps from his field press, then he began to unstitch more pieces of the quilt, to wrap around his feet.

The Trolls wouldn't be able to carry as much in it when they came back for it. He'd made too many holes in the quilt. 

But his feet would be warmer. 

He ate, slept, and exercised, trying to keep up his strength. 

He had nightmares of being crushed to death by falling rocks, of a seedling sending out shoots of stone like tree roots from his stomach to impale him from within. Of becoming so desperately hungry that he would eat the leather quilt and then cannibalise his own flesh. Of being rescued, and waking up in the cave again, surrounded by Trolls with the sharp teeth of catamounts and cocks like knives glowing in the dark.

He walked the length of the cave, climbed on the intrusions of rock, looked for exits that weren't there, for ways to keep his mind from stumbling into the darker hole that yawned ever-widening underneath his weakened spirits the longer he waited, sharpening bits of tin while he lay on his blankets, counting the drops of water dripping into empty tins before he could drink a single cup. Shaving blindly, feeling the razor's edge at his throat.

He ate the salted meat, chewing it extensively. Swallowing hurt less. His chipped tooth remained sensitive, unable to repair itself.

He examined the growths on the rocks. Fruiting bodies ripened, glowing like jewels, their light dying if he plucked them. 

The sample of lithophyte he'd scraped up in a tin can had shrivelled up, reduced to a shapeless little ball giving no light of its own. 

He remembered the fire plough. He produced a spark and fed it the dried specimen. It caught. He burned the empty waxed paper wrappings of his dwindling food supply, rejoicing at the first real warmth he'd felt in weeks, the flames too bright for his gloom-accustomed eyes. If they burned long enough, he might heat water to brew tea.

He scraped off more of the lithophytes. The fresh material didn't burn as well, and gave off a terrific, strange-smelling smoke.

Feeding the flame with great care not to smother it, he gathered as much of the lithophytes as would fit in the empty bowl of the tallow dip. He placed the smoking bowl under the chimney of a fissure, and watched the updraft carry the smoke away. 

If it were daylight outside, perhaps someone would see it. Perhaps there were search parties out looking for him after so long.

Perhaps there was hope for him yet.

 

xv.

 

He picked more growths off the walls and heaped them next to the bowl. The fruiting bodies burst as he harvested the lithophytes, working his way from the far ends of the cave towards his living space, leaving spores suspended in shadow behind him. 

When the flames died, he waited, then lit more fires at intervals, hoping to at some point cycle, however irregularly, into daylight hours when the smoke might be observed. If the skies outside were clear, if the visibility were good. A continuous plume would be easier to follow, but his resources were too limited to keep one going when he had no idea of the conditions outside. There was only so much combustible material at his disposal, only so much to burn once he'd picked the rocks clean. It seemed wiser to make it last, at least a little, than to burn it all at once.

The more lithophytes he collected as fuel, the darker the cave grew when the fire went out. 

His fuel would run out, as his food would run out. There'd be no point in sending out a message if he were in no shape to receive an answer. No point leaving the lights on while he starved. He lit another fire, and plucked out the rest of the phosphorescent growths to burn.

He drank sweet tea tasting of the tin can it had steeped in, sitting on his haunches by the fire. The smoke made his head spin and his eyes water, but he tried to hold on to this moment of warmth. He finished his tea and put the empty tin next to the sharpened lids, the last morsels of food inside his bag, and set the bag down by his blankets.

He tried running down lists of plant names in the order of their classification to while away the hours until the next signal. So many sexual systems, so many reproductive morphologies. Carnivorous orchids lured in insects, and, sometimes, let them live to pollinate others of their kind. He'd seen no insects in this cave, which trapped him like a bug at the bottom of a pitcher plant.

He lit the last fire in total darkness, his hands sticky from the final harvest as he worked the fire plough. He figured he could move about by feel to collect water, to eat the last of his food while waiting for rescue. He had nowhere else to go, and nothing more to see here. Everything he had left was no further away than his body length's distance from him.

When the fire went out, it left an afterimage in the back of his eyes. It stayed with him as he sat. It was the last thing he saw before he went to sleep.

He dreamed of swimming in a viscous fluid that pulled him under where he couldn't breathe, his mouth and nose filling with it as it solidified.

He was awoken when he heard a clattering noise in the pitch dark, and felt the ground suddenly give beneath him, and feared an earthquake before he realised that something had pulled the blanket out from underneath him, tipping him out of his bed. He froze, on the cold ground, disoriented, unable to see, straining vestigial muscles in his ears to listen —

Troll.

Moving quietly about the cave, a predator's gait for a body that gave a scent of dirt and vegetation, limbs that rustled like leaves. He heard the sweep of leather on rock.

And he sprung towards it, scrambling in the dark, scraping his knees on the floor before he laid a hand on the quilt and pulled himself up hand over hand until he grabbed at the Troll's arm, clutched it bodily about the elbow, clung onto it as it moved. He felt the arm rise and jostle him, and he refused to let go.

The Troll's other hand closed around his waist and still he refused to let go.

The Troll pulled its arm out through the circle of his arms, and he grabbed at the leather quilt that followed in the Troll's grasp. 

The Troll looped the leather blanket around him, and slung it over its shoulder. He found himself dangling off the ground by the waist, head hanging down over his heels, heart in his mouth.

Then to his great wonder the Troll began to climb.

He saw nothing, folding his arms about his head to protect it from hitting rock as he swung from the Troll's back, cracking an elbow instead as the Troll hoisted itself up through the mouth of the cave and began a near-vertical ascent. He feared he might slip and fall out if he tried to straighten up, dash himself against the rocks and never come out alive. He grabbed at the back of his knees with one arm and kept his already-injured elbow around his head, wincing at the pain.

Terrified and exhilarated.

Laughing, or sobbing. He couldn't tell. He held back from making noise, barred himself from making any distraction that might cause him to slip from the Troll's grasp.

His eyes searched the dark. He craned his neck, trying to see above, looking for a pinpoint of daylight beckoning to him from without the mountain.

But, of course, there wouldn't be daylight outside.

Not yet.

 

xvi.

 

He felt gusts of air as they passed intersections where the main tunnel must branch off into other galleries. The pitch of the Troll's climb changed, closer to the horizontal.

He smelled rain, pines, flowers. A fire burning.

Heard nocturnal insects chirping.

The Troll dropped him. A split-second of panic, falling, before he landed on all fours, his injured arm buckling underneath him. He pushed himself onto his back and freed his elbow. It radiated pain, but he was able to unfold his arm, move his numbed wrist and fingers. Perhaps he hadn't broken any bones, but he'd hit a nerve. The scrapes on his knees and elbow were raw, and he'd fallen onto something soft... A bed of fresh-turned earth, warm and smelling of recent sunshine, crumbling between his fingers, but he still couldn't see anything.

He was much closer to the surface, but not out of the caves yet.

A yank on his injured arm forced a scream out of him. A Troll had grabbed him around the forearm. He felt the wet tendrils of a Troll's mouth licking his fingers, and a pull around his hand as it swallowed him deeper. It sucked the sticky lithophyte residue clean off his skin.

Then he felt himself grabbed around the other arm, another mouth closing on his other hand, lifting his shoulders off the ground. Then something grabbed his ankles, and tore off the leather slippers. All that he'd brought out of that deep gaol, in his hurry to depart. Mouths closed around his feet, but only briefly. 

The mouths on his hands lingered, but instead of feeling revulsion, he relaxed into the touch. He no longer thought it likely that the Trolls would eat him. The sensation felt pleasant, and it had been so long since he'd felt any kind of contact at all. The feeling returned in the hand of his injured arm, the pain at his elbow lessened.

He fell back when they released him and stretched out his uninjured arm, patting the ground. He touched something akin to the foot of a small tree, with roots digging into the earth, bark curving around an ankle, a leg: a Troll, standing next to him.

He sat up, trying to find any kind of marker to orient himself. The insect sounds were far away and echoed against the cave walls faintly, but there were noises like the branches of a forest creaking in the wind, without the wind, muffling the echoes. Then a grunt, and that dizzying silence he'd last felt when the two Trolls had been conversing in the cave, but now so much stronger. 

A Troll took hold of his ankle and dragged him down in the dirt. He felt a large hand pressing on his chest. Then something dripped into his face, both sticky and runny. He licked it reflexively, before his common sense suggested it might be poisonous, but it tasted sweet, sharp and delicious. Not as cloying as honey, but not sour like the bodily fluids he'd ingested from the Trolls. He brushed the dirt from his hand against his shoulder, then wiped the other syrupy drops off his face and sucked them off his fingers.

The mucosas in his mouth started to burn, not unpleasurably. He'd almost forgotten the taste of spices. Then the hand lifted off his chest, and he sensed a weight over him as a Troll's legs sank down on either side of him, and a Troll's cock pressed against his lips.

He smelled grease on the Troll's cock, and he started to gag, but the burn in his mouth intensified, his eyes began to water, and he opened his mouth. The Troll's cock slipped in, immediately soothing the burn. But he was still thirsty, and he grudgingly appreciated the ploy as he started to lick and suck on the enormous member. The more he worked on the Troll's cock, the more the foul taste of the grease and the burning sensation in his mouth gave way to a pleasant tingle, and a warmth that spread throughout his body. He worked harder, licking the sides of the Troll's long shaft, sucking on its tip, taking in as much of its length as the width of his jaw would allow, raising himself on his sound elbow to reach higher between the Troll's legs. The Troll's body seemed to shiver under his touch, but it did not force itself on him.

Then the Troll came, spurting a jet of fluid into his mouth that he drank in every drop of hungrily. It seemed to coat his empty stomach in a cool layer, and he realised how truly empty indeed his stomach had been, from the weeks of rationing, and no longer weighed down by a Troll's finger... Had he digested that so gradually that he hadn't realised it was gone before now?

If they must use him again, this gentle coercion seemed the more pleasant alternative to another brutal rape.

The Troll rose.

He lay back in the dirt.

Another Troll kneeled over him, settling into the grooves left by its predecessor. Waiting.

Again, he opened his mouth, took in the Troll's cock. This one not covered in grease, but dirty, literally, smelling of the same earth it kneeled in. He pulled back and spat in his hand, stroking the cock to clear most of the dirt off, then washed it clean with his mouth, spitting out muddied drool, less revulsed by the taste than he'd been when it had first been forced upon him, but unfamiliar with the shape, the peculiar bumps and curves of this Troll's cock. Was it the one that had taken him down to the oubliette and bound him and toyed with him? He focused on bringing the Troll off. Get it over with, make them come, make them happy, if Trolls could be happy.

He was close. He might be able to feel his way out of this cave to the outside, if he followed his nose. The smells of the mountain could guide him in the dark.

The Troll came, and he let the fluid wash the dirt out from his mouth instead of swallowing it. It swirled around his teeth, flowed out of his mouth and down his chin, trickling onto his chest. He wiped his lips and thought he saw a shimmer of light across his palm for an instant, but the darkness could have been playing tricks on his vision.

A third Troll took its place.

He knew the larger, unsettlingly familiar form of its cock even before he felt the hands taking hold of the sides of his face, felt the protrusion of one of its fingers, like a pointed twig growing out of a stump, pressing into the skin just below one of his eyes. The Troll forced his jaw wider, and fucked his face slowly while he felt his chest contract in terror and dug his own fingers in the dirt to control his rising panic. 

He bore the fear as patiently as he could. It would be over soon. He worked the muscles in his throat to stimulate the tip of the Troll's cock, sucked as best he could the too-wide shaft pumping in and out of his mouth. He raised his eyes to try to look at the Troll looming over him, but only saw the pinpricks of stars behind his eyelids from choking around its cock.

Then the Troll came, forcing him to swallow, and released him. 

He curled up into a ball, half-buried his face in the dirt, cradling his sore elbow against his stomach. No more. He'd had his fill. They'd had their fun.

He wondered if his vision were playing tricks on him again, or if the sun might be rising, letting a warm light in through a gallery in the side of the cave. Shadows danced wildly over the cave walls.

A Troll had come in, bearing a light. The flame flickered in a bowl it carried, burning tallow.

At first he thought he might be in a forest or grove after all, surrounded by a copse of trees. Perhaps their canopy had hidden the stars from him, blocked out the moonlight and only felt like a cave. His eyes slowly adapted to the light.

Then he made sense of what he was seeing.

His desperate screams were muffled by the multitudinous bodies of Trolls crowding the cave, waiting for their turns.

 

xvii.

 

He backed away, stumbling in the dirt. Screaming his refusal over and over. 

They caught him, the three that had already fucked him, before he could run out of the cave or leap back into the oubliette, if that had been his only other alternative at that moment, rather than to stay and see his nightmares come to life. 

They held him down. 

His feet kicked in the dirt. Hands closed around his shins. Hands pressed down on his chest, held his arms. They'd overpowered him when he was in robust health. Now he struggled harder, screamed harder. Exhausted himself faster, but fought regardless.

More Trolls closed in around him. The tallow bowl burned somewhere behind them, casting their shadows over him. Many more hands reached out to hold him, pet him, inspect him, making a bower of arms and torsos around him.

They folded his legs back, bent his knees over his chest, lifting his hips up out of the dirt.

One of the Trolls placed a few drops of the peppery syrup on the sensitive skin under his balls, where it began to burn, then inserted a fingertip and spread it around inside him.

The burn took his breath away, silencing his screams. He wept, knowing what to expect next, and because the burn hurt, and he wanted the pain to end so much that he'd welcome it.

One of the waiting Trolls spread flaming tallow on its cock, and extinguished the flame after rousing itself into a burning erection. It came toward him, and he bucked his hips toward it, begging to be penetrated so that the grease might take away the burn inside him.

The Troll bent towards him, testing his opening with a grease-slicked finger which brought him such comfort on contact that he sighed. 

The Troll lifted him higher off the dirt, then slid into him. Its cock was smaller and more tapered than the ones he'd taken in his mouth before. And still warm. It stretched him out without reopening his old wounds. The grease soothed the burn and spread its warmth inside him. It felt so good. His weeping turned to sobs of helpless relief. 

The Troll began to thrust, bumping up against a spot inside him that spurred his pleasure centers. His cock began to respond, hardening, burning with his own need. He felt inflamed, but the burn did not hurt anymore. 

The Troll thrust faster, and came too fast. He was aroused now, and the release of the Troll's cool fluids inside him took him further away from his own release. With his arms spread wide and pinned down he couldn't touch himself.

The Troll withdrew, and another came forward with a cock glistening with cold grease. It stretched him wider, and fucked him fast in shallow painless thrusts that did not bring him off when it did.

Were they sparing him to leave some of him for the others to follow? It all felt planned out in advance to coax him into compliance. To make him want it.

To make him beg.

A third Troll took over. Longer, narrower. 

A fourth.

A fifth.

He begged.

Sometimes they bumped up against the spot under his bladder that made him moan with pleasure. His own cock was leaking now. He wanted the Trolls to take an interest. He wanted to feel their mouths on him. 

Instead he felt a cooling bloat growing in his belly.

The next Troll fucked him without grease, and he savoured the friction. He wanted to burn again.

He struggled against the calming weight of all those rough squeezing hands on his body. 

A Troll tilted back his head and filled his mouth with its cock.

They fucked him from both ends. Spitroasting him and ignoring his cock.

Their climaxes sending chills into his body to cool his own excitement.

More Trolls carried on, used him. The Trolls' cocks pistoned into him, stretched him out, furrowed his body and flooded it before he could come. He lost count of how many had ploughed him.

He felt them slowing, hardening.

The nights would have been growing shorter since he'd been underground.

They slowed again.

When the cock next pulled out of his mouth he clamped his jaws shut and clenched his teeth together with all the might he had left in his weakened muscles. Troll hands slowed, brushing against his cheek. The Troll's cock stopped, glistening with his saliva, a short distance from the tip of his nose.

He kicked his legs, struggled against the arms holding him down.

The cock still inside him hardened. The thrusts stopped.

He took a deep unobstructed breath.

Every part of his body was immobilised, but he'd kept his mouth free to breathe.

The sun had risen outside, and a faint grey light filtered through a side gallery into the cave, where the Trolls had turned to mute stone.

He screamed for help.

 

xviii.

 

He'd survived this once already.

He knew he could survive it again.

He also knew he would likely wish he were dead by the time night fell, or soon thereafter.

He screamed. He was so close to the outside. Trapped in a thicket of petrified Trolls, inside a cave, but within earshot of the exterior of the mountain. He heard running water. He could breathe, could close his mouth without breaking teeth against stone, but he couldn't use his hands now. Couldn't move his legs. A different stress position. Better-supported, but more restrictive.

His body was bound, pinned in place all over again.

Fucked in place again.

There were hands on his wrists, on his arms, on his shoulders. Hands reaching around his face. There were hands on his chest, under his lower back, around his hips; hands holding his thighs, spreading his knees apart, encircling his ankles. A Troll's body pushed against his, driving its cock into him. Large bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder to restrain him.

More Troll bodies pressed around those of the ones holding him down: watchers.

A faint green hue around their heads, where the grassy hairs were in bloom. No view of the cave except its ceiling, past the slit, assymmetrical tip of the Troll's cock pointed at his mouth. No more dancing shadows, only the stillness of stone. The tallow dip must have gone out, untended.

Already the dirt he lay in began to itch, and he wondered how many insects would come crawling out of it, or enter the cave, attracted by the Trolls' blooms.

He screamed again. The sound seemed to die within an echo chamber of Troll bodies. 

He wouldn't die of thirst. His stomach had overflowed with Troll come before they'd turned to stone. Still in liquid form, their come also bloated his belly, stagnating inside him. On second thought, he hoped he wouldn't die from an excess intake of liquid.

He screamed some more, then lay his head back in the dirt and closed his eyes.

He'd survived this before, he told himself. 

How interesting to get the opportunity to repeat the experiment. How scientifically thrilling to get another chance to experience first-hand the Trolls' diurnal cycle, to confirm or infirm the hypothesis that they would reanimate at dusk, and to have a larger sample to study.

His own laughter sounded insane in his ears.

He sobbed quietly under the Trolls' hands.

He was tired.

The dirt around his body kept him warm, at least. Potted in his own personal plot, by so many devoted gardeners. The birds sang outside the cave, and a dozen Trolls tucked him into this bed of earth, cradled him with their great stone hands, after a stomach-filling supper. What more could he have asked for?

He hadn't been warm, hadn't been touched, hadn't been full in so long. 

 

 

His bladder woke him up. Floating up from sleep, unable to move, left with no other choice than to piss on himself, he felt physical relief and a vague resigned disgust in giving in to the necessity. His very urine smelled of Troll, pooling in the hollow around his head.

He couldn't gauge how long he'd slept, still only half-aware of his surroundings. The blood had rushed away from his toes, but the day had gotten warmer, even inside the cave. He was still so tired. He wriggled in place, itching, wet, wishing he could roll over to a more comfortable position. He should scream for help, but that would finish waking him up. And he'd need his strength to survive another night.

His mouth was dry. His limbs felt so heavy.

He should call for help. Someone might hear.

Insects buzzed around the flowers crowning the Trolls' heads above him in the dim cave. 

He should...

 

 

 

He awoke with a start, suddenly aghast at having slept most of the day and maybe missed his chance to be heard and rescued. There was no change in his situation, but he felt better-rested, and his body had managed to rouse an erection that he couldn't touch.

He worked saliva back into his pasty mouth, tasting Troll and dirt on his tongue. 

Then he shouted for help again, screaming himself hoarse.

He wiggled his body in the dirt, tried to scratch against the Trolls' hands. The earth he'd fallen on and crawled through trying to escape had been soft and loose. Perhaps brought in from outside and laid here as a thin topsoil for the occasion, especially for him. Or did the Trolls feed like trees, absorbing nutrients in the ground through their lower limbs? What photosyntax took place in their petrified form, either in the sun or in the dark?

He wondered if he could free himself by dislodging the earth under him, but he could barely move. The earth had been packed, tamped down underneath and around him by his own weight and by the Trolls', and there was no way to free his legs to get around the hard stone cock inside him.

The stone cock had warmed from being inside his body all day. Warmer than Troll cocks usually felt. He wondered if he could bring himself off. Pinned down so completely, he wouldn't risk injury from thrashing too wildly against the stone now.

He tried to conjure pleasant thoughts, to remember any kind of pleasure that would take him elsewhere in his mind, but the Trolls filled his whole world now, and their horrid mouths had brought him sensations he'd never dreamed possible.

And if he contracted his stomach muscles, lifted his hips just a little, oh yes, there was the sweet spot. He moved his pelvis against the unyielding cock, strained his body against the unyielding hands around him. Imagined the tendrils of the Trolls' mouths around him, feeling the warmth of arousal spreading up his half-engorged cock and filling it out to full thickness.

He screamed for help, and fucked himself up into the Trolls' embrace. He could barely move around the cock, was too dry to thrust in any case, but could move enough, just enough, to feel something, to scratch an itch inside in lieu of all the itches he couldn't reach outside.

He came weakly, feeling looser around the Troll's cock. 

He tried to rotate his forearms to dig himself out. The injury in his elbow flared up, and he couldn't turn the palms of his hands toward the ground.

He could see ugly scabs on his skinned and dirty knees. He was covered in filth, filled with it, moulded by it.

It was getting darker.

The Trolls would have to fuck him in the dark again, or relight their tallow. Did they have any more of that burning ointment, the better to inflame his loins and force him to savour their abuse in spite of his repulsion?

He wondered if he'd make it through another night, knowing there would be no rescue. Knowing he'd never escape so many of them.

He wondered if the Trolls would make him beg again.

And if he would he beg them to stop, or to fuck him harder.

 

xix.

 

The Troll cock softened at nightfall. It pulsated inside him, coming to life.

The Troll hands holding him down half released him. Others grasped and pinched him, moved forward to take up the spaces that had been vacated. The Troll cock pulled out, and exploring hands caressed his thighs, fingers invaded him, tested how far he could stretch, tugged at his genitals, ran across the stains on his torso.

The Troll waiting to fuck his face forced his mouth open. He didn't resist anymore.

He felt more than he heard the bodies. A rush of air coming in to cool his skin as the wall of Trolls surrounding him broke apart. Trolls massing around the exit, heading out of the cave. The cave walls echoed Troll voices that made his body hum around the cock in his mouth.

They returned smelling wet. A newly lit tallow dip stretched their lurching shadows across the ceiling. 

A freshly greased cock took its turn at him, his body relaxed enough to stretch further still. The Troll's clawed fingertips sank into his thighs, its thumbs piercing his skin as they hooked into the softest inner surfaces of his legs. He gave in, took the abuse, bucked his hips against the Troll fucking him, grabbed on to the hand that squeezed around his thigh drawing blood and the hand holding his face wide open as other Trolls relinquished their grip on him, stretched himself taut between the two Troll cocks to feel them slamming into him together, to keep them inside of him.

The assembled Trolls dispersed, joined up in smaller groups. The Trolls fucking him finished, cast him aside and moved away, let him flop down hollowed out and bleeding in the dirt in the middle of the cave. The Trolls' fluids oozed out of him. They'd left him wide open. The earth underneath him ran to mud, stinking of Troll.

He tried to stand up. The blood rushed back into his lower body, and he blacked out, collapsing in the filth.

Coming queasily back to his senses, he was further dizzied by the sensation that the whole cave was moving around him. The Trolls' bodies writhed everwhere he looked, flashes of flame disorienting him further as they used burning tallow to grease themselves up before fucking each other. 

He crawled toward the exit, limping on his weak elbow, his knees sinking in the mud. The Trolls coming and going or fucking around him presented obstacles that impeded his progress, threatened to crush him when they rolled over or walked over him, but they did not stop him. He left a trail of filth in his wake.

The gallery opened on the rushing water of the mountain brook, flowing from higher still in the bare peaks that cut a black silhouette against the starry sky. There was enough indirect moonlight that he could see the Trolls standing in the water, drinking. 

He smelled the fresh night air and the smoke of a Troll fire downstream. 

He stretched a hand out into the frigid water. Cupped his shaking hand into the water to try to bring it to his lips. 

A Troll came through, carrying a bag, almost stepping on him. Splashing water onto him in passing.

The water trickled through his fingers before he could drink. He only wiped his wet hand across his face, moistening the filth caked on his skin. 

The next Troll to return from its drink grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back into the cave. 

He saw the other Troll dumping out its bag, heaping more fresh earth on the pile where Trolls were fucking each other now where he'd been fucked by uncounted numbers of them before.

He was forced up on his knees to face the Troll's crotch, a misshaped erect cock was presented to him, and he sucked its wet shaft until he could drink the Troll's come and sate his thirst.

Then he was passed around, like a toy. A plaything now supple and pliant in their hands, an open receptacle stretched out to accommodate the monstrous girths and crooked lengths of their cocks, famished enough to beg for more when he was suckled on their come and the Trolls' fluids filled the furlong of his need. 

He hugged a Troll's torso as it fucked him, rubbing himself up in its lap, the hairs on its groin tickling his balls, pressing his skin against the Troll's rough, wet body. It pulled him off itself and handed him down, dripping from one Troll to the next, hanging like a ragdoll in their grasp. The next Troll made him jump up and down on its cock with the force of its thrusts, gushing inside of him.

Two Trolls sucked on each other's cocks like nightcrawlers in the mud, and another Troll pounded him into the ground next to them until his head touched the rocky floor underneath the dirt, and he had to claw mud away from his face to breathe.

A Troll found the jar of spiced liquid and dripped it onto its cock and fucked him while he wept and flailed helplessly against the burn. When it released him, its cool watery come leaked out of him like molten fire against the burn, and he howled. He flung himself at the Trolls in the dark, reaching out to them, desperate to find a greased cock.

And they fucked him. Fucked the burn away. Fucked his reason away.

He abandonned himself, surrendering when Trolls found new ways to stretch him, thicker members penetrating him deeper still, squeezing like knotted roots past the pleasurable inner parts of him, making him moan in ragged breaths before other cocks took over his mouth and fucked it, and he sucked them greedily, welcoming most enthusiastically those Trolls who'd bring him more of the syrup that made their taste fade under the burning on his tongue.

Some of them even sucked him, sending him into moments of delirious pleasure. He wrapped his legs around their heads and thrust into the wet sucking toothless mouths of the Trolls, wanton lust overcoming him. He longed for those moments when he could get hard again and a Troll took notice of it. When rough lips and long inner tendrils would tease and pump his cock and it felt like coming would pull his whole body inside-out into the Troll's suction, and the flush of release flooded him with pleasure that left him limp and looser still and it took a bigger Troll cock to stretch him to his limits again.

He came, and came, and his ejaculate mixed into the dirt with the Trolls', was shared by Trolls from mouth to mouth like a delicacy. And then he was coming dry, his balls twitching but his body too spent to produce any more fluid.

He tried fucking a Troll, greasing his own cock, but he was too soft and weak to do more than hump at the cleft of its legs, and in return it knocked him over and milked his useless cock with its hand while it fucked him, squeezed his balls while he whimpered in its grasp.

Pairs of Trolls took turns fucking him end to end and switching sides midway through fucking him, so that he tasted the fluids of the one on the cock of the other, and they were all filthy by then and he couldn't care anymore what it was that he swallowed.

He wanted to be full, needed to be touched. Wanted to be the center of their attention again, to be surrounded by Trolls and feel their hands and cocks and mouths on every part of him.

He climbed onto their bodies to grind himself against them while they were being fucked by other Trolls. 

A Troll lifted him in its hands and impaled him on its cock, jacking itself off inside him, before reclining to suck the cock of another Troll, leaving him to squirm there, on its lap, his legs splayed too widely apart to find purchase, his own weight keeping him pinned on a still-engorged shaft too long for him to lift himself off of. He stroked his own cock and couldn't bring himself off with his own hands, but he loved feeling the head of the Troll's cock distending the skin of his belly, pressed his hands on the bulge and rubbed his cock against it, found blissful contentment at the fullness of it, of being thoroughly stuffed by and mounted on a mountainous Troll and taking the full length and width of its cock without being split apart by it. 

Feeling like he'd conquered the mountain itself, he arched his back and put his weight on his arms and lifted his hips, raising them until the bulge went out of his belly, and came down on the Troll's cock again until its shape made a distinct outline on the skinny frame of his starved abdomen, fucking himself on it freely.

The Troll's cock started to harden again underneath him.

He thrust against it, slick with grease and come, excited at bringing the Troll off a second time in one sitting.

The Troll's cock grew harder and harder and unyielding. He bounced himself against it, not realising immediately that the Troll had stopped responding, that the bodies everywhere in the cave had gone still, that he was the only one still rutting among them.

 

xx.

 

The way out of the caves was right there, unobstructed, past the bodies strewn in the mud, and the immediate problem of his impalement.

He tried to lift himself off the Troll's cock again, almost vaulted clear of it, but his weary, injured arm gave way and the slick, hard stone rammed all the way back into him in one shockingly painful jolt.

Suddenly he was awake, wide awake and aware that he was fucking himself on a petrified Troll. Aware that he had been trying to make a Troll come inside him, after they had left him to die, after they had tortured him, after they had raped him, because he'd found it easier to lose himself in the mindless sensations of his body than to revolt against his complete helplessness before theirs. Another Troll cock pinning him in place.

He could just stay there, he thought exhaustedly, curling in torment around the bulge in his belly. Sleep through the day right where he was. Spend one more short summer night with the Trolls. There must be other ways they hadn't fucked him. There must be more to learn from them. He could find out if all this wild group rutting were part of Troll reproduction, if their spilled seed would take root in the mud, or in his own body... He could find out if the Trolls could turn him into one of them, and then he might stay with them forever without the constant fear of suffering and death.

The Trolls' mouths around his cock had made him want it badly enough that he was losing perspective. Whatever process transfigured them at dawn, there was no reason to think it might follow that a man could also be transfigured into a Troll. Starvation and infection would sooner transfigure him into a corpse if he happily let them fuck him to death. 

Trying to find the leverage to lift himself up, to scissor his legs and bring up one of his knees and un-impale himself, he turned a quarter-circle on the Troll's cock. His knee scraped against the Troll's rough petrified skin and it tore the scabs off his wounds. He lifted himself on his arms again. It didn't work. The Troll's hips were too wide. Every attempt to bend his body around the cock to find his footing pushed it inside him at awkward angles. His legs were too weak, the Troll's cock was too long, its body lay too low.

He pulled on his legs and managed to lift and fold them, one at a time, until he was sitting side-saddle on the Troll's cock, the tilt of his hips around it almost unbearable, and then he pushed himself up on his arms using his own front leg as leverage, pushing with his back leg.

He lifted himself up again. 

He managed to just clear the tip of the Troll's cock, and stood as it pulled out, and almost fell directly onto it again as it released a slippery flux from inside him. He slid off the Troll's lap into the mud, where his legs buckled beneath him and he nearly blacked out again in trying to stand up.

He was still whole, but he felt as gutted as a fish on the way to the frying pan.

He needed to get away. Now. While the day was young and there was time for him to put enough distance between himself and all of the Trolls that might launch themselves in pursuit of their missing toy at dusk that he'd have a hope of evading recapture.

He staggered out of the cave, stumbling into the glacial water of the brook. It rushed into his open wounds, into his gaping body, constricting his blood vessels as painfully as if he'd been stabbed. He waded through the water, his feet already numbed by the cold of it, and crossed under the natural bridge of stone to the watershed where he could climb out of the bed of and onto the bank beside the stream again.

From there he could see the still-smoking open fire where the Trolls had a cauldron of animal flesh reducing to tallow, the smell of meat mixed in with the fat making him long for solid food. He saw raw bones, and a fresh skin laid out on a rock next to the tatters of the Trolls' blanket. And a lone Troll, toiling away at its butchery, frozen in its work as the others were in their debauchery.

He did not tarry to examine the nature of the meat, the source of the skin and bones, to find clothes or tools he could use, or to take out his rage against that Troll.

He ran.

 

xxi.

 

All day, he ran and climbed down the mountain.

Sweating, filthy, still covered in mud and Troll come above the waist where the water hadn't rinsed him off, completely naked, bleeding from more cuts and scrapes as he scratched himself on branches and stepped on thorns and stumbed and skinned his knees again and cut his palms catching himself before he broke any bones, dazzled by sunlight, he moved through the thickening woods toward the lowlands in a frenzy leadened by fatigue.

Night fell, and he kept going, scampering down, down in the night, a pregnant gibbous moon lighting his way.

Three weeks since he'd stumbled upon the three Trolls that had first caught him.

Hoping the Trolls were still too busy fucking each other to come after him, hoping he'd get far enough away that he'd overcome the desire to run back to them, hoping that the fluids he'd ingested all those times they had fucked his throat would sustain him as he ran with neither food nor water, nor stopping to make a shelter for his unclothed body, he ran.

He didn't remember collapsing from exhaustion. He found himself lying facedown in the underbrush, bitten by insects, cramped, thirsty, his elbow swollen and his wounds attracting flies, awakened by the deafening sound of thunder when a storm shook the canopy of trees and soaked him through. Picking himself up again, lost and shivering in the rain, an indeterminate number of days after his escape, he walked, continuing downhill until he reached the trail leading to the prospectors' camp, haggard and feverishly ill, and almost unrecogniseable when they finally found him, but alive.

They carried him to a tent, where they nursed his fever and cleaned his cuts and splinted his arm and he spent another week laid up in bed, fighting off infection, before he could even talk of his ordeal.

The Trolls had taken him. That was a known risk; the locals had warned them. The usual explanation for mountain disappearances. Few ever returned, and none that did were ever the same. The mountains had devoured them, physically or mentally.

The prospectors had sent a search party looking for him during his absence. They'd returned, having found traces of a campfire, his twisted field clippers and some scattered, destroyed camping gear, but no trace of him. They had even camped there, taking turns on a watch overnight. They had not reported any glowing vegetation on the ridge, or other fires burning in the night. They'd thought him lost, most likely dead, and hadn't the resources to do a more extensive search. They hadn't forded the brook to find the opening of the caves he told them about.

The prospectors were sollicitous to his suffering, but thought he'd been the victim of misadventure owing to his own foolhardiness, going off into the mountains alone and becoming overwhelmed by the hardships of survival in the wild. He was a scientist, not a seasoned explorer. 

He didn't explain what the Trolls had done to him, but he suspected they gleaned some of it from his nightmares, and thought he had latched onto local legends in his delirium.

They did not say it, but he was mad.

And he was useless as a field botanist for their survey. They arranged to have him returned home, proposing at first to escort him to the nearest village during the next resupply, when he was fit to travel, where he'd wait for traders that could accompany him on to the next way station. His replacement would be hired by post, if they could find one. Meanwhile, they carried on with their work.

He watched them digging, collecting ore samples, drafting geological and topological maps of the land. They'd begun reassembling the large drill they used to seek treasures below the surface of the earth, moving to a different spot where they hoped they could begin pumping minerals that burned more efficiently, more cheaply, than organic fuels.

He wondered how long it would be until they unearthed the Trolls, or if the Trolls would move back, deeper into the mountains, and escape notice for a while longer. 

He got better at pretending that he was mending. His tooth would need to be capped by a dentist, or extracted if it got worse before he could reach one. His elbow had probable long-term soft-tissue damage, and he would have superficial scars from his cuts and scrapes from head to toe.

Eating was a problem. 

All things considered he was lucky he'd escaped any lasting digestive troubles, and they mistook his initial symptoms for dysentery, from which he recovered. Parasites in the water could afflict travellers indefinitely, and he might have picked up any number of them. He would need to see a doctor and get treated when he returned home.

But nothing tasted right anymore. He didn't explain why grease and raw greens made him nauseated, or why he cut his food into minuscule pieces before chewing it, and excused himself from anything spicy. That could be chalked up to his chipped tooth, at least. 

He sat outside at dusk, afraid of being retaken in his sleep, wondering if he would be transformed himself, turn into stone at dawn, and cried in his cot when he woke up by daylight, still resolutely human, from dreams that reminded him of the Trolls' inhuman touch, with morning hard-ons that wept for the mouths of Trolls.

He got ready for the journey home. He packed what clothes and equipment were his that had stayed at the survey base and not been destroyed. He washed, averse to his own flesh, and resolved to make himself presentable. A prospector lent him a straight razor, shaving oil and scissors. He'd need to be rid of the mangy beard that made him look like a mountain man, and cut his hair to a respectable length, to sue for readmittance into civilisation.

More than anything, he wanted to find a way to finance his own expedition. He would never be able to tell the Botanic Society what he really hoped to find, but perhaps he could attract interest, backers and companions, by writing reports on the strange glowing lithophytes, and return, better-equipped, to the mountains.

He did not look his reflection in the eye.

As he started to shave, he saw a tiny purulent flower growing parasitically on a squamous patch of skin on his jaw, and his hand froze around the razor at his throat.


End file.
